In the recent past, customers purchased machines to palletize bulk loads of empty containers that were semi-automatic. These machines required manual placement of tier sheets and top frames. More recently, fully automatic palletizers were introduced that took the manual placement of tier sheets and top frames to an automatic function of the machine. The convention non-robotic bulk palletizer consists of many frames joined together occupying horizontal and vertical space much greater than our invention. Space is cost to a manufacturer.
A recent invention is the integration of equipment that will form a tier of containers, stack the tiers of containers, place pallets, tier sheets, and top frames and prepare the load for strapping and removal to the warehouse. See U.S. Pat. No. 6,658,816 assigned to Kaufman Engineered Systems, Inc., which herein is incorporated by reference.
Specifically, the patented invention for bulk palletizing containers is comprised of a tier staging area, a programmable robot with cantilevered arm and end-of-arm tool, a tier sheet station, a pallet station, a top frame station, and a load build area. The end-of-arm tool incorporates that full tier pickup, tier sheet pickup, pallet pickup, and top frame pickup. The single robot will perform all functions in the sequence. The patented invention uses a robot to gather the tier of containers and carry it to the load build area for stacking the tiers. The invention uniquely includes a programmable robot with cantilvered arm as a single end of arm tool for placing pallets, tiers of containers, tier sheets and top frames in the load build area.
Recent inventions to case/bulk palletizer systems have made great strides in the industry using innovative end-of-arm tools (EOAT) on the cantilevered arm of robots. This invention is aimed at making further improvements using vision aided systems. Infrequently, the dunnage in the dunnage supply line may be skewed and the EOAT may not transfer the donnage properly. Infrequently, the tier of bulk/case product may contain a void resulting in the tier of product being rejected.